There are no reasonable arguments against doping in sports for adult athletes beyond the college level.
Here are the arguments I have heard against it, and why they do not hold water.
It’s cheating.
It isn’t if you legitimize it.
It’s unfair.
It isn’t if everyone has unfettered permission to do whatever they want.
It’s dangerous.
Possibly. But so are sports in general. Doping aside, professional sports is probably pretty bad for you. But the point is irrelevant, since adults should be able to choose whether or not they want to trade away safety for the glory and financial reward of sport.
If adults dope, kids will dope.
This is the strongest argument, but on the other hand we let adults do many things we don’t extend to children. I think a general rule that an underage or college athlete (I include college because it spans that transition from underage to adult) caught doping will not be allowed to compete professionally will fix this problem.
It makes previous sports records less significant.
Who cares? The idea of comparing athletes across eras is a parlor game and has nothing to do with whether or not we should legalize performance enhancing drugs.
It makes women ugly, at least for East German swimmers.
Well, maybe this is the strongest argument, now that I think about it. But not strong enough to dissuade my general position.
Are there any more powerful arguments against doping that I am missing? Don’t get me wrong here; as long as it’s against the rules, I don’t support it. But I do support changing the rules and getting me the best entertainment money and drugs can buy. It makes no sense to me that the guy who can afford high altitude training facilities gets to have a high hematocrit, but the lowlander who can only afford erythropoietin gets dinked. You got genes for high testosterone? Hey; I got testosterone gel. Let’s get it on.
Playing a sport is a job. We would never allow de facto drug use to be a prerequisite for any other job. Especially when there are clear, deleterious consequences to using drugs. More importantly, if we are going to legitimize drug use for sport, then you can hardly make them illegal for everyone else. Why should a baseball have a free pass to use illegal substances when you or I can’t? Given that allowing drugs would basically mean 99% of athletes would have to use to be competitive, the idea is a non starter.
Also, you’re not fooling anyone :D. This is only of particular concern to you because it will mitigate the advantage Black athletes have due to their genetic superior. You see folks, although Black are mentally deficient, we are gifted athletically. That’s why so many of us are professional athletes. I mean, how many White NBA players are there? Not that many because they are genetically inferior. Makes perfect sense. Tide goes in, tide goes out. You can’t fool me Chief Pedant! You only want White guys to dope so they can keep up. Not on my watch buddy.
No. It’s absurd. Takes everything away from human’s strive to be the best at something w/out artificial enhancements. And there are plenty of those doing just that as we speak. Every 4:00 in the AM to bedtime.
People with genetic ‘gifts’ have an innate ability that other people have to dope to get. People who have less myostatin have muscles as big or bigger than people who use steroids. Some people have a genetically higher VO2 max, some remove lactic acid faster, some have more red blood cells.
People who want to dope are free to start their own “sports” leagues, apart from the clean ones we have now. I have a suspicion though that it will all end up looking like WWE, a ridiculous sad spectacle that is unwatchable by anyone with an IQ higher than 70.
I don’t agree with the legalised doping. I do not think its as bad as it is made out to be. Nor do I think that “clean” athletes are necessarily winning “fairly”, they almost always are not. Elite athletes have access to training regimes, experts, infrastructure and other facilities that almost no one else has and that is a big reason why they dominate. Ian Thorpe, Michael Phelps etc are fantastically talented swimmers, but their success is in large part due to living in first countries where they have access to such advantages. Now, someone in the Maldives or the Congo could never hope to emulate them, no matter how talented they are, no matter how many thousands of hours they put out in a swimming pool.
First, the article doesn’t say they DIRECTED pilots to take drugs. They were suggested for some patients to use for the drugs prescribed use. That is hardly the picture you painted. Besides, are you really comparing things like steriods to Dexedrine, which is often prescribed for things like ADHD?
You’re the one who said “drugs”, and didn’t limit it to steroids. And amphetamines are certainly another form of performance enhancing drug, so yeah, they fit right in. And if pilots refused to take amphetamines they could be involuntarily grounded. So in fact using amphetamine was indeed a prerequisite for being allowed to continue to do their jobs. Or it could be made so.
Which reminds me, even though it’s a but far afield – remember before Gulf War I, hundreds of thousands soldiers were ordered to take experimental drugs designed to protect against various kinds of chemical warfare.
Oh, and “some patients”??!! Make that virtually all operational combat pilots under certain combat conditions. They were “patients” to the extent that docs wrote them out speed prescriptions.
And again, you think comparing taking a generally innocuous drug being legally prescribed by a doctor to patients *in combat *is at all analogous to allowing athletes to take generally illegal, largely untested drugs on their own volition? If you are just trying to play gotcha, fine. I overstated the matter. But if you think they two situations are the same, you are kidding yourself.
Letting the athletes dope would make watching pretty boring. It would just come down to who had the best chemists assisting them. Now, if dopers want to start their own “open” competitions (or versa vicey), go with my blessings.
Well, heck, if it’s the “untested” part that bugs you so much, here’s your chance for thousands of willing (indeed eager) human guinea pigs to take various drugs and be subjected to precise performance measurements. Heck, with complete transparency, high-level sports could be quite useful as a laboratory, with possible spin-off benefits for the rest of us.
I have, in fact, gone on record here and elsewhere that we ought to legalize recreational drugs. I am opposed to the stupid stupid “war on drugs,” and the toll it has taken on society, particularly the SES disadvantaged. But that’s another thread.
There are “clear and deleterious” consequences to playing football. Yet we allow it. The toll it takes on the brain, the joints and the rest of the body is evident to any of us who take care of ex-football players as they age. Negative consequences are not, as I mentioned in the OP, a reason to keep performance-enhancing drugs illegal. We are talking about an elective decision by an adult to trade away his future health for current glory. Only a nanny-stater thinks we should not permit that. I’m of the opinion that you should be able to smoke and drink yourself to death; recreationally drug yourself to death and beat-the-crap out of your body to death. It’s your life, and you get to establish your Greatest Good. If that greatest good is sports glory and not longevity or health, have at it, and dope on.
As to equalizing the genetic superiority of blacks over the Inuit for the NBA…while it might help the Inuit, unfortunately the black guy gets to dope also, so the bar will just rise.
On a more serious “fairness” note, I think doping promotes fairness. I can’t choose my parents, but I can choose my training regimen and I can choose which drugs to help overcome Mother Nature’s screwups. I wanna be this guy, and I want my athletes to be able to be that guy on steroids. Literally.
If a safe pill came along tomorrow that would actually make me smarter, I’d be taking it starting tomorrow. It’s disingenuous to pretend I’m supposed to be beholden to a genetic potential that was not of my choosing.
It’s not as if any drug would be the main determinant in a sportsperson’s ability. You can take the best designer drugs money can buy, but if you don’t put in the work, you aren’t going to become a competitive professional boxer, say.
Did you read my OP??!! It’s not cheating unless you make it cheating. And the proposition in the OP is to make it “not cheating.” That’s what “legitimize” means.
As to taking away from “human’s strive to be the best” at something…where would you like to draw the fairness line? Can I get an operation to fix a club foot if I was born with one? Or do I have to take mother nature’s unilateral decision about my genes and play with a deformed foot? (and yes; I know it worked out well for Tom Dempsey)
Can I take insulin for my diabetes? Or do I have to avoid the “artificial enhancement” of insulin for my health?
If I’m born without adequate testosterone, can I take supplemental testosterone? Do I have to take only enough to get to the bare minimum, or can I take enough to be at the high end of normal?
If I have asthma, can I take steroids? Beta agonists? If I have hypertension, can I take beta blockers, which have a side effect of blocking performance-related anxiety? What about benzodiazepenes for seizures?
I posit that all efforts to introduce “fairness” are doomed to failure. Nature is unfair. Life circumstances are unfair.
Doping, if anything, levels the playing field as long as it is legitimized. By keeping it illegal, we make the playing field less fair, because some people are born with a disadvantage, and some people are better cheaters than others.